We unhappy few

The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) held their first convention in the summer of 1962, in Port Huron in the American mid-West, an hour’s drive north of Detroit. They were the cutting edge of radical organising — in the battles against racial discrimination, particularly in the South, in the protests against the Vietnam war, and more generally in the aim of the young then to break the shackles of the cold war consensus that had paralysed independent thought and spread fear of McCarthyite purges through what remained of the organised left in America, in the labour movement, the churches and the universities.

SDS had been founded by Tom Hayden two years earlier. His initial manifesto was presented to the 1962 gathering, revised by committee and delivered as the Port Huron statement (1).

“We are people of this generation,” it began, “bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit. When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world: the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute Western influence throughout the world … As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss. First, the permeating and victimising fact of human degradation, symbolised by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from silence to activism. Second, the enclosing fact of the cold war, symbolised by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract ‘others’ we knew more directly because of our common peril, might die at any time.

“While these and other problems either directly oppressed us or rankled our consciences and became our own subjective concerns, we began to see complicated and disturbing paradoxes in our surrounding America … we began to sense that what we had originally seen as the American Golden Age was actually the decline of an era. Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living. But we are a minority — the vast majority of our people regard the temporary equilibriums of our society and world as eternally-functional parts.”

Melting of the ice age

Reading these apocalyptic lines today, a reader is surely struck by the thought that 1962 was somewhat late in the evolution of the cold war to make these discomfited observations. It was 14 years since President Truman had launched the post-war militarisation of the US economy. By 1950 US military advisors were in Indochina; by the mid-1950s America’s imperialism had crushed reform in Guatemala and Iran. A year before the Port Huron statement, President Eisenhower left his presidency with his famous warning: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist … we must … be alert to the ... danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific, technological elite.”

At the University of California at Berkeley, the ice of the cold war had begun to melt in 1956: its students started to organise against compulsory military training on campus (ROTC) with a hunger strike, and by 1962 ended in total victory with a vote by the university’s regents. Joe Paff, then studying political science at Berkeley, remembers how stultifying Berkeley was when he arrived: “Middle America was resurging with khaki buckle-in-the-back pants and button-down collar and oxford cloth. It was pretty much a uniform. Compulsory ROTC required males to drill in uniform once a week; fraternity boys at the entrance to campus enforced conformity; the student body elections were considered jokes … the campus had decided that students should not talk about ‘off campus issues’ and should be protected from ‘outside agitators’.”

Paff invited Malcolm X to speak on the Berkeley campus in May 1961 “but the University high command rejected him, saying he was a minister who might convert people to Islam. We found him a venue at the last minute, with no time for publicity and room for only 160. It was electric, the most extraordinary speaker I have ever heard. He changed everyone’s life forever. You’d ask him a question; he’d look you in eye and repeat your question, then really go into it. Pretty soon people got scared of asking dumb questions. All the blacks sat together and not one of them acknowledged you when they left. Within a month, half of the blacks were giving Malcolm’s speech.”

The 1960s rolled into motion. Students began to head South to work with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), founded in 1960. But though many radical documents were generated, none captured as vividly as the Port Huron statement the angst so many young people felt as they sought to struggle free from the conformism of the 1950s. Professors were frightened of being fingered as commie pinkos.

The Port Huron statement reverberates with an underlying loneliness and alienation. Beyond liberalism and socialism there was a fundamental issue of self-realisation, of fulfilling potentiality — a theme that seems to come from Paul Goodman, one of the founders of Gestalt therapy and anarchist author of Growing Up Absurd, a popular text among the radical young both sides of the Atlantic (2). The section of the statement titled “The Society Beyond” depicts the newly aware students surrounded by a vast doldrum of “apathy” with the entire society depicted as an alienated realm of false consciousness. The cultural task of students was to show the real despair that lay beneath the high-paying working class jobs and the emptiness of tailfins on big cars and fishing boats out front of the holiday tract home beside the lake. Organised labour is submerged in the vast apathy of the “society beyond” and the union leadership hasn’t read Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts to articulate the varieties of alienation. (A job the SDS offers to perform.)

Essential optimism

A very short chapter deals with the economy. It begins “Many of us comfortably expect pensions,” depicting an America of wealthy citizens who are discomfited by the existence of poor people in their midst. It sounds today like Utopia, and the essential optimism underlines an important point, that the authors of the statement, despite the initial remarks about the end of the Golden Age of Affluence, actually had little sense of the volatility of capitalism — a flaw in foresight which extended to almost all the major economists of the time. By 1969 the American working class — in its upper, mostly white tiers — had reached the apex of capitalism’s rewards in wages and appurtenances such as large comfortable cars with baroque adornments, a second car for the wife who did not as yet have to go out to work, labour saving devices in the home, pensions, health benefits and, after 1965, Medicare — socialised health insurance for those over 65. From the 1970s onward, it was downhill all the way.

The section “Alternatives to Helplessness” invokes committed students strategically placed throughout the land surrounded by a vast sea of apathy and complacent materialism. How to effect change? “From its schools and colleges across the nation, a militant left might awaken its allies” (though the precise nature of the “allies” is left unspecified). “It [the new left] must give form to the feelings of helplessness and indifference, so that people may see the political, social and economic sources of their private troubles … The bridge to political power, though, will be built through genuine cooperation locally, nationally, and internationally, between a new left of young people and an awakening community of allies.”

With the hindsight of 50 years we can smile at the optimism about how easily we could “harness the atom” and build thousands of reactors everywhere, defeating militarism and creating cheap and easy power. The statement is energetic in expressing fear of a united Germany, buttressed by a belief in the permanence of the Wall and the cold war. What’s termed “The Industrialisation of the World” is seen as an issue of “noblesse oblige”. America should share its technology with kindness.

Yet we must acknowledge the impact the Port Huron’s denunciation of the cold war had on older leftists such as Michael Harrington and Irving Howe — the “New York intellectuals”. They furiously denounced it for infantile underestimation of the aggressive potential of the Soviet Union and broke off organisational ties with SDS. Here was a true dividing line between two eras, one that marked the emergence of a generation that would, by the end of the 1960s, denounce the American Empire as at least equivalent in evil to the Soviet Union.

Though the SDS fractured in 1969, its memory lived on, thanks to its activists who always nurtured their historiography, somewhat exaggerating their role. Movements such as the Black Panthers were less fortunate; many of its leaders, imprisoned or assassinated, were unable to write histories of their struggles. The career of Tom Hayden helped in the retrospective recognition of the SDS. In 1964 he was organising poor communities in Newark, New Jersey; a few years later he travelled to Hanoi with his wife Jane Fonda; later still he joined the Democratic Party and became an elected member of the California state legislature.

Recently we have witnessed the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, with its encampments — for now dispersed by the police — from New York to Oakland. The lack of intellectual and organisational continuity between the two formative episodes of US social history is striking. The SDS could trace a lineage of ideas back to the early writings of Karl Marx and, as the 1960s progressed, to Frantz Fanon, Paolo Freire, Gunnar Myrdal. This is hardly the case with the OWS, perhaps because of the evolution of American capitalism and the decline of the old organised left. The authors of the Port Huron statement saw themselves as sparks of lonely resistance in the vast dark night of American complacency. The OWS movement see themselves as representatives of 99% of the population. Once the few, the isolated, the one per cent, were the bold avant garde; today the one per cent form the power against which we should be fighting.

Alexander Cockburn

Original text in English

Alexander Cockburn is a journalist and co-director of CounterPunch magazine and website